Today, a quick test of AMD’s A10-6800K processor combined with a FM2+ motherboard from ASRock. The A10-6800K (Richland) is an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) that packs on the same silicon a 4-core CPU clocked at 4.4GHz and a Radeon HD 8670D with 384 stream processors clocked at 844MHz. A10 processors are the high-end family of AMD’s APUs and the A10-6800K is the flagship model of A10 series. More information about AMD’s APUs can be found HERE.

The main goal of this article is to see if the A10-6800K is a viable solution for my OpenGL needs (development, prototyping).

2 – Tests and Benchmarks

I installed a fresh copy of Windows 8 64-bit. I also installed the audio and network drivers from the CDROM. Once the network was ready, I installed the latest AMD Cataylst 13.12 WHQL. Here is the GPU Caps Viewer (v1.20.x+ required) screenshot of the graphics subsystem:

The A10-6800K processor includes a Radeon HD 8670D with 384 shader processors. Compared to the 2816 shader processors of a Radeon R9 290X, 384 SP looks like a bit weak, and that’s true. But at the same time, the Radeon HD 8670D is enough powerful to handle correctly many non-too-much-heavy 3D apps.

The following screenshot shows three instances of GLSL Hacker with three different demos: OpenGL viewer, OpenGL 4 tessellation and video player. Look at the nice framerates:

The following screenshot shows a compute shaders test (OpenGL 4.3) running at 160FPS (okay, the same demo runs at 3000FPS on a GeForce GTX 660, but 160FPS is perfect when you only need to test a compute shader…):

Now some benchmarks. I used the latest iteration of GpuTest (v0.6.0) to benchmark the A10-6800K. GpuTest is handy because you can quickly bench a GPU, it’s cross-platform (Win/Linux/OSX) and it offers several tests: fur rendering (FurMark), tessellation (TessMark), geometry instancing, and pure processing power with 100% pixel shader tests (PixMark).

As you can see, depending on the test, the HD 8670D is close to the GeForce GT 650 (tessellation test) or is
faster (in Volplosion: pure pixel shader test with tons of maths).

Here are also the scores of 3DMark (2013 edition) with Ice Storm, Cloud Gate and Fire Striketests:

3DMark (2013)

Ice Storm

Cloud Gate

Fire Strike

Radeon HD 8670D

69932

5972

1041

GeForce GTX 660

126605

14263

4523

Radeon HD 7970

135899

15316

6100

3 – Monitoring Utilities

A word on monitoring. I must that it was not easy to find an utility that correctly monitors the A10-6800K. I tested several tools (CoreTemp, SpeedFan, HWMonitor, GPU-Z, Speccy) and I finally found the ultimate combination: Speccy + GPU-Z:

Speccy is the only tool that provides detailed monitoring of the A10-6800K CPU: clock speeds, temperatures of each core of the CPU. The latest version of GPU-Z is the only tool that reports correctly the temperature of the GPU.

4 – Conclusion

I’m positively surprised by AMD’s A10-6800K APU. This is my first contact with AMD’s APUs and for a low price you have a honest platform to develop and play with 3D because the Radeon HD 8670D is enough powerful for most of OpenGL / Direct3D prototyping tasks and tests. What’s more, the Radeon HD 8670D supports OpenGL 4.3 (and OpenGL 4.4 depending on the drivers) which is not the case with Intel HD Graphics solutions (limited to OpenGL 4.0 if I’m not wrong).

Update (2014.01.06)
Here is an update of the test with a 8GB kit of DDR3-2400 memory:

I had some instabilities and shutdowns caused by heat dissipation and I ended up to use a Corsair Airflow
to correctly cool the memory kit 🙁

The XMP 1.3 profile was set in the BIOS.

Here are the new scores with the DDR3-2400 memory kit:

GpuTest – FurMark test (OpenGL 3.2)

1024×640 windowed

1920×1080 fullscreen

Radeon HD 8670D + DDR3 1600

891 points (14FPS)

498 points (8FPS)

Radeon HD 8670D + DDR3 2400

1123 points (20FPS)

695 points (11FPS)

The DDR3-2400 brings a +26% performance boost in the 1024×640 test and nearly +40% in the 1920×1080 test. Nice!

GpuTest – TessMark X16 test (OpenGL 4.0)

1024×640 windowed

1920×1080 fullscreen

Radeon HD 8670D + DDR3 1600

13124 points (218FPS)

8705 points (145PS)

Radeon HD 8670D + DDR3 2400

14398 points (240FPS)

9736 points (162PS)

The DDR3-2400 brings a +9% performance boost in the 1024×640 test and +11% in the 1920×1080 test.

you would have to be a complete noob to make a noob error like buying 1600 ddr3 to go with an APU and then wonder why performance is crap. Just the jump between 1600 and G-Skill 8GB Ripjaws X DDR3 2133 Dual Kit is an instant 25% performance increase.